This is a great piece by Heidi Cohen on why your marketing needs content curation and 12 attributes of a successful curation strategy. This is one of the best articles I've seen on this topic in a very long time.

As I said, I've seen many pieces on curation but if you're like me, everytime I read about this, I always find something new or am reminded of ways I can polish what I'm doing.

Here are some of the highlights.........

Intro:

Why Your Marketing Needs Content Curation

At its core, content curation is like a great editor or blogger who brings his unique taste and understanding of his target audience to his selection of the best content for his readers.

**He provides contextfor the content so that it's more than a collection of information

3 Reasons your content marketing strategy needs content curation:

1.Offering your audience a combination of original and third party content provides a branded context for your work

2. Curating other people's content positions you and/or your organization as a tastemaker in your field

I chose this infographic and article from Blackbaud because it helps you go from social media to social business. It was written for non-profits but it definitely applies to any business as well.

By understanding how to evaluate people by their degree of influence and their ability to helpchange behavior in others can be invaluable to you and your organization.

**It's also important to use this information to understand how you and your organization fit intothis mix. They say knowledge is power, once you have a clearer picture, you can shift what you're doing and take your business or cause to the next level for greater results.

Intro:

"Understanding the Value of Your Social Media Influencers: How to Identify and Empower Those Who Can Engage an Entire Community!

(Download the White Paper Today!)"

Here are some highlights:

**Learn how to use the information your consitiuents are sharing to attract more people to your mission, campaign.

**Learn how to analyze your database and assignsocial scores to engagers that represents their ability to interact with and influence others across their online networks

**Based on the social score you assign to these individuals, you can then segment them into one of four categories, each of which plays a diferent role onsocial networks, relevant to your business

Here are the categories:

Key Influencers - They have a powerful impact not only the people they know but also others they don't know. Their posts are widely spread and shared by more people than many other people

art

Engagers - These people have well-establishedsocial networks and are strong influencers of people they know personally

Multichannel Consumers - They enjoy keeping up with social media conent and occasionally participate. Their influence is not a dominent part of their persona

Standard Consumers These engagers read and watc updates more than they create new content or make comments. They are more influenced by family and friends.

In this piece, there are 8 tips to help marketers get in on the social curation boom in a meaningful way - that means Pinterest and beyond!

Here's an excerpt:

"Curation is a long-standing tradition of collecting, saving & organizing objects. Today it takes on a different meaning. Organizataions have evolved from collecting artifacts to digital curation of media and content"

When human behavior shifts and it certainly has, (more about that in the article), brands are quick to follow suit.

Here are some highlights:

There are a lot of websites offfering curation-type services

To get a clear sense of how a brand might leverage curation in this article, they have broken them down into categories.

**social bookmarking and news

**sharing

**Aggregation and syndication networks

**There are 8 ways your brand can get in on the action

Here are a few that caught my attention:

Become a curator creator

**Create your own Pinterest board and it's more than just slapping images, it takes thought, strategy, being part of the community and continually showing up

**appreciating other people's content and having two-way conversations

Create an Interest-based content strategy

**Focus on the interests of your audience, not your products and services!

An Infographic published by Mr. Youth - http://bit.ly/zgjXLd , a word of mouth marketing firm, polled 4500 adults to uncover the impact of social media on purchases.

They discovered that social media not only influences brand reputation and PR, but often can lead directly to a sale.

Over 90% of respondents either received or made recommendations to friends and families on Facebook. 65% of these social recommendations directly led to a purchase.

On top of that, 80% of those who received a response to a social media post by a brand made a purchase as a result of that interaction.

With numbers as striking you’d think businesses would be quick to comprehend. Yet according to the study, brands only respond to half of their social media posts, divided almost equally between Facebook and Twitter.

This piece was written by Jeff Turner, it makes you STOP and think. Pinterest is the latest new shiny thing but as Jeff says, buyer beware. His insights are right on the money.

He asks us to know the enviornment before we start posting and promoting. Here's an excerpt:

The Pinterest Stream And Fools Gold

Avoid Self Promotion:

"Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion".

Here are the takeaways:

My advice here is going to be the same advice I give people in any new social network... go have some fun first.

**Be social. Get to know the community, the lay of the land. The rest will sort itself out.

**The first thing that happens when the real estate community for example, "discovers" a new social media site is they focus on the media, not the social. This is a mistake. It leads to mining in the wrong streams.

This piece was written by my friend and fellow curator, Beth Kanter for socialmediatoday. It's one of the best articles because she really understands Pinterest and is using it effectively.

Here's what she had to say:

My Pinboards on Pinterest...

Pinterest is a virtual pinboard where you can organize and share images and videos you discover on the web. Think of it as social network of visuals – where you can find images from other people with the same interest or use it to curate your own visual “interest space.”

The clean interface and simplicity of its features make it easy to use and gives you a calm feeling which perhaps accounts for its popularity.

**At first glance, the site attracts people interested in using it for non-work interests, such as wedding planning, decorating, scrapbooking, and family photos, but brands and nonprofit professionals are also using it to curate information related to professional and organizational topics in a visually pleasing way.

****But if you want to be successful, you must curate and share relevant content.

Thanks so much for curating this post also published on Social Media Today. The original on my blog: http://www.bethkanter.org/pinterest/ got the most retweets - probably because of the wide interest. I noticed you were curating a separate pinterest collection too. I put together small curated collection of resources about Pinterest for Nonprofits as I will be teaching it in workshops this year in the Middle East - http://socialmedia-strategy.wikispaces.com/Pininterest

This a great blog post from Rian van der Merwe , describing the noise you can find on the web now, and especially content just created for SEO purposes or advertisers. As many, Rian is tired of it.

Rian speaks for many of us who are overwhelmed, overloaded with content that gives us no value at all. This is the problem

"I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you’re smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing"'

Here's what caught my attention:

****The wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs[2]. And the reality is that “Alternative Attention sources” simply don’t exist.

The Scoopit team agrees!

My input:

****The Opportunity: This is the time for all good curators to come forward - 2012 will be the year of the content curator -

**Know your audience

**Know their pain points

**Find and select the best content, add your own opinions, information or anything that will provide more value for your audience

**Select only the best content, don't just aggregate links that add to the noise

**Become a trusted resource - many opportunities will come to you, it's your time to shine

Effective social business requires a strong brand message, great content and the ability to build community through deeper engagement and is first and foremost. However, the way you package your services matters and the colors you use are very important.

Excerpt:

"Colors matter and they are one of the factors that keeps your company standing out, gives your company a voice and gives you leverage over other similar companies."

I’m sure a lot of you guys have looked into curation software available ...

Obviously with the radically different price points they all do different things, but here’s the gist – a whole lot of this you can do for free.

Step One – Define your Parameters

Define your parameters by where you want the goods to go. Make sure everything is accessible from the beginning so you can leverage your curated content efficiently from the start.

Step Two – Choose your Weapons

e.g. Timely.is; G+ and FB

Step Three – Be Intentional with your Schedule

I can’t speak to your industry/niche but I can tell you that when I do my curation at somewhere between 6 and 8am EST I find a goldmine of posts that are brand-flipping-new

Step Four – Be Crazy Time Sensitive

I make sure to only curate content that is timely [less than 1% of the time curate something more than 24 hours old]

Open up a google search and type in “content marketing” at the beginning of my day, and set it to the last 24 hours.

Step Five – Be Consistent

As long as you are curating the same general stuff over and over it will work for you.

Notice: Steps 1-5 are all about the setup or protocol. Steps 6-9 are the actual daily work.

Step Six – Prepare for Battle

Open windows to the following places:

Google searchTimely.isWP dashboard to my curation siteGoogle +FacebookTwitterI also have a Word document open

Step Seven – Get Rolling

e.g. search for the term “content marketing” in the last 24 hours as shown above; grab 5 or 6 posts that are relevant and make tweets about them and put them on timely/buffer/scoopit

Step Eight – Natural Overflow

Doing twitter first thing after curation is great, if you have the time.

20-30 minutes after you have your automated posts in place to interact with your feed, clean out the spam tweeps, follow back the real people, etc.

Step Nine – Use what you Learn

Use your curation is as the basis for your own blogs

Not regurgitation, but rather letting your new-found knowledge fuel your next post. Or, add to the list of blog ideas you have on a running list somewhere.

Setting aside this 45 minutes a day to get the most relevant pieces of content your industry has to offer can not only fill your feeds, but it can also fuel your entire day. And it should, because you should be talking about the latest things in your industry.

Some great tips. Would you also spend the time commenting on the curated posts? I know there are some who believe that it is a necessity and others who feel there is no need as you are merely helping others to filter the noise. I try to mix it up depending on time available.

If you're still on the fence about the signifigance of content curation and how it can propel your business, this piece from Search Engine People addresses the 7 most common B2B content curation myths and offers bulletproof answers to them.

Intro:

B2B content curation is not a fad! It's a fact. According to a recent study conducted by MarketingSherpa:

**84% of the surveyed B2B buyers indicated that they are very likely to click through industry news and articles from vendor sources.

****Still, many B2B businesses fall prey to some ethical and SEO related myths that force some of them to avoid content curation altogether!

Here is one myth and the real truth that caught my attention:

B2B Content Curation Myth 2: Content Curation Is Unethical

****There is a huge difference between curating content and "pirating" content!

****Here are some ethical guidelines to help you out:

**Give tribute to the original content owners by mentioning their names linking to their content sources

**Do not republish an entire third party story and make it your own. Simply quote few paragraphs or summarize parts of the content, making a clearreference to the content owners

****ALWAYS create DO FOLLOW links to their content and rest assured that your SEO will remain intact

****Intelligently building on curated content makes your final output authentically yours. I love that thought!

Key Takeaways:

****More B2B businesses are starting to realize the questionable significance of content curation to their overall marketing strategy.

Robin, I really enjoyed listening to you, I know this is aimed at non-profits but your insights, tips and suggestions are something we can all use.

Here are a few things that caught my attention:

**BEFORE you get on the web, decide how much time you're going to spend on there, otherwise it could become addictive, and this can happen if you're not careful (hmmm how many of you can relate to this?)

**Know who your audience is, pick a very specific topic,

**be as narrow as you can, find great pieces, pull out what you think would be relevant for them (being too broad doesn't help filter out the noise for these people, it adds to it)

I'm going to let you get right to the interview and let Robin tell you more:-)

****Industry experts and analysts have begun to focus on content curation as a keymarketing strategy.

**** “Content curation has emerged as one of thehighest potential enterprise tools for B2B marketers to draw and engage specific audiences,” said Susan McKittrick of the Patricia Seybold Group, who has conducted several in-depth reports examining the growth of content curation within the realm of marketing.

In February, 2011, **(It will be interesting to see what these statistics are today as we approach 2012). HiveFire surveyed more than 150 marketing professionals; our data supported McKittrick’s insights:

**Forty-eight percent of marketers are already employing content curation in some form or another

**58 percent of those surveyed who are curating content are mixing both original and third-party content, which solidifies the curator’s credibility among its audience

**Robert Davis, PJA Advertising’s senior vice president of digital marketing, believes that employing a content-curation strategy--in particular, curating third-party content--is essential for increasing a brand’s influence and position as a thought leader in its space.

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**You need to put yourself into the mindset of a publisher by writing blog articles, producing podcasts, and authoring e-books and whitepapers.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.